Of all the winners of HOT ROD's Win Your Dream Engine Contest, none are as manic as Chris Williams, the Pontiac zealot from Sleepy Hollow, Illinois. But who can blame him? It's been a over a year since we announced the deal. The contest involved 6,039 readers entering by designing an engine using any parts they wanted from the participating companies (Edelbrock, Comp Cams, Performance Distributors, Speed-Pro, Milodon, and ARP). We chose four winners with the Chevy, Ford, Mopar, and Olds or Pontiac combo we liked best. The four winners were named way back in the Oct. '03 issue (yeah, it's been that long). The Ford was tested and given away last month, and now we're down to Chris Williams' Pontiac.

Chris' '75 Trans Am is already a hottie, running 11.88 at 114 mph with no compression, on pump gas, and in fully streetable trim. His engine is the original, numbers-matching 400 but with ported Edelbrock heads and a fairly big roller cam. Obviously aware that his TA is going to be worth some serious coin someday (if not already), Chris doesn't want to wear out or ventilate his original block. His plans for the Dream Engine were to build a 600hp 455 that will run on pump gas and, as Chris said, "sound wicked pulling into cruise night." When asked why he should win, Chris was not above blatant stroking, saying "so I can take my matching-numbers block out and brag on next year's Power Tour(tm) how great Hot Rod magazine is." He's been on six Tours in the TA and has Long Hauled twice.

Here's the combo Chris put together, including all the part numbers and the power curve, using a Pontiac 400 block with a 455 crank turned down to match the 400's smaller main-bearing sizes. After the dyno pulls were done, we compared this engine to a nearly identical 455 Pontiac we built a year or so ago, but with a much smaller cam, and it was very interesting. Normally, we go straight to the bottom of the page when selecting a cam and so did Chris, but it didn't appear to work that well in this case. Chris' engine, with a healthy solid-flat-tappet 255/266-at-0.050 cam, peaked at 504 hp at 5,300 rpm with a torque peak of 552 lb-ft at 4,300. Our previous 455, with a smaller 230/236-at-0.050 flat tappet, made the same horsepower (501 at 5,200 rpm) and a good 23 lb-ft more torque at a lower 3,600-rpm peak point. With Chris' engine, the higher rpm at peak torque and weaker average torque curve combined with power rolling over at 5,300 rpm tends to indicate the cam is way too big for the capability of the cylinder heads at this displacement, and we think the 106-degree lobe separation angle is also a big part of the problem. Armed with this information, we'd probably choose a hydraulic-roller cam of about 242/258 degrees at 0.050-inch lift on a 110-degree LDA. Instead, Chris told us he intentionally overshot the cam so he could later port the heads and make more power. So we did that for him.

Tim Martindale at Dougan's Racing Engines, which built the engine, has probably ported more Pontiac heads than anyone in California, and he's puttin' the rub on them as we speak. Look in next month's Test and Tune for an update on how the improved flow may add up to more power on Power Tour(tm) in Chris Williams' Trans Am.